The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

  If it had been Lilly, I’d have taken offense, but Berenice sounded desperate, which is pitiful in a seventy-six-year-old radical woman. Did I really want to get into stilling? Berenice couldn’t wait out my pause and said, “We can help pay next year’s tuition.”

  “I’ve got a full scholarship.”

  “Can’t you get out of the house in Giles County?”

  “Not easy. I’d lose my deposit.” And I’d have to move this illegal equipment.

  “We can pay for it.”

  “Let me think about it.” Shit, why not? I wouldn’t have to distill to pay the summer rent then, or go back to Momma’s surrounded by all those various kin, some who wanted me to be starchy like them, the others waiting for me to fall. “Would you want me to clean?”

  “No, really, I can manage that. Just help with the groceries, carrying them, not buying them. I’ve got a power vacuum system in the walls.”

  “Je ne suis pas une maid.”

  “Of course not. Vous être companion. Lilly told me it wasn’t cancer. Do you think she’s lying? If she still wants me to go to the Institute, then I’m going to be paranoid.”

  I felt like I’d just tottered back from the edge of a cliff, a criminal career, Dennis DeSpain’s black mistress and business partner. “Why would Lilly lie to you about that?” I could keep the house in Giles and sneak off from time to time when Berenice visited old radical friends.

  “I just realized she could die before me. It isn’t likely, but she could. To spite me. I want her around to rub my feet when I’m dying.”

  “Oh, Berenice.”

  “And you’ll have to go back to school in the fall.”

  “Yes, regardless of whatever else happens.”

  “Good for young people to be tough. You’re not headed for the grave, so what concern of yours is it?”

  Momma doesn’t want me to ever work as a maid, I thought. “I could get paralyzed by a car and then you and Lilly would both have to take care of me.”

  Berenice laughed. I might as well have something more legal to do this summer. And Berenice and Lilly would discourage me from going back to DeSpain and making liquor both. I said, “I think you’re being a bit fussy, Berenice.” My belly was going, DeSpain, DeSpain.

  “Sorry. Will you help us out?” She sounded much younger then, more like a regular person instead of whizzy Berenice.

  “Sure. And you tell me I’m being a fool if I start talking to Dennis DeSpain again.”

  “Well, we don’t want you to do that. Lilly’s representing the alien.”

  “He’ll need her soon,” I said.

  “Explain.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” I said, remembering their paranoia that their phones were tapped.

  “I agree with you, twice,” Berenice said.

  “I’ll bring my stuff over now if you’ve got a spare room.”

  “Then it’s a done deal.” Berenice sounded so relieved. We hung up. I went downstairs with my computer and saw Dennis waiting by my car. He didn’t look angry, so I hoped he hadn’t found out about my own still.

  “Marie.”

  “Dennis, I’m going to be taking care of Berenice Nelson while Lilly’s in the hospital having surgery.”

  “Orris thought we were getting too serious. That’s when I realized how much I…” Dennis couldn’t quite say wanted, but he knew lusted would be a bit too crude. Seeing him cooled me off a little. I guess. “Would Berenice … yeah, she’d mind, wouldn’t she? How come you’re doing maid’s work for her?”

  “Companion, not maid. Because otherwise I have to stay at home with all my loser relatives.”

  “Not all of them are losers, Marie.”

  “No, but the ones who aren’t tell me how stupid it is to have an affair with a cracker bootlegger. No offense, Dennis.”

  “Orris was threatened because you’re at Tech.”

  “Like if I’d been at New River or cleaning up rooms, Orris would have approved? Jesus, Dennis, how can even a bootlegger stand to be married to such a bitch?”

  He twitched his face muscles and froze them. I feared I’d protested too much or that he’d caught some vocal cord corrosion from my breathing in over mash. “Orris made herself into a lady.”

  Well, I was just insulting his wife. “I’m honored that she considers me a threat, but, Dennis, I quit you. Not the other way around.”

  “I thought of you when I saw a Chinese Negro Hollins student.”

  “Go after her then, Dennis.”

  “She was a whore.”

  “Dennis, if it takes slutting to get rid of you, I’ll take out a license.”

  “You’re not like that.”

  “Not before I met you, I wasn’t. I’m still an honors chemical engineering student. I’m not sleazing around with a poly sci degree just to say I’m not a mill hand.”

  “You think you’re better than us?”

  “I will be.”

  “Christ, Marie. I want to see you again.” Then he said, “Lilly’s that alien’s lawyer, isn’t she?” Dennis is so sneaky. Maybe he had my phone tapped to see where I’d be next?

  “I don’t know.”

  “When she going in for surgery, Marie?” He started to come closer, but moved back when I stiffened.

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “Well, I can ask around. Probably call her office. Have someone else call. She refused to represent me.”

  “Well, she has better sense than some people.”

  “Marie, I just want to talk to you.” He ought to have known talking to in Black English meant seeing, meant going out with, all those euphemisms. He smiled slightly as if he’d realized what he’d have said if he’d been talking Black.

  “Dennis, what you thinking about that alien?”

  “I been seeing sign of its dealing on Loose Trade. And someone got Hugous’s account away from me.”

  “You been following him?”

  He shuddered ever so slightly. “I dunno.”

  I didn’t want to provoke Dennis by asking if he feared the alien.

  DeSpain Identifies a Trade Rival at Least Once

  DeSpain decided the alien seemed to be in the liquor business without anyone’s permission—no legal license, even if a man could get one in Southwest Virginia, no agreements with the present illegal distributors. But the only thing wrong was that the alien seemed too open about what he was doing. DeSpain sat in front of his computer for an hour as Loose Trade deals popped on and off the screen. He wondered what arcane connections this alien could have.

  Orris came in and leaned her breasts against his back. The nipples felt accusing. “How’s Steve doing in school?” DeSpain asked.

  “I have no idea. You signed his report card last week. I told you I wanted to see it.” Her voice rumbled through his body.

  “I’ve got a rival. He hired that Lilly Nelson woman to represent him.”

  “I’ve heard that she never represents liquor makers.”

  “He’s that fucking alien. I guess minority something or other played a part, manipulated her sympathies. How is he getting away with it? Who is he paying off?”

  “Is he really that much of a threat?”

  “Somebody’s taken half my nigger accounts.”

  Orris pulled her breasts out of his back so her voice wasn’t vibrating through his spine and ribs but hit him straight in the ears. “You don’t need a female black to be helping. What about bringing in a male?”

  “I’ve got to find out what I’m up against.” DeSpain sat thinking in front of the keyboard, then exited the system and said, “I’ll go pay him a visit. No threats, just sniff around a little.”

  “Take me out to lunch first.”

  They drove to the Shogun, where Orris ordered miso soup and a cold noodle dish. DeSpain stared at the octopus legs with their organic suction cups and said, “I’ll order in a minute.”

  Orris said, “Europeans think Americans work too much.” She and the Japanese chef always
slightly mocked every other living being who wasn’t Japanese or Orris.

  The Japanese chef giggled. DeSpain felt his face turn red. Orris whispered, “Ask him what Japanese eat for lunch.”

  DeSpain knew what he felt about the businessmen who ordered various sushi cuts set up on plastic slabs, talking about Citicorp, Mitsubishi, and the Orvis catalogue center. “Knowing you, it’s miso soup and noodles.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Well, bad enough dealing with them all so superior in Tokyo. Now they moving to Roanoke.” DeSpain heard the old accent grip his voice and saw the business guys at the table wince. Well, if they were so stupid as to eat sushi for lunch when real Japanese ate miso soup and noodles, DeSpain wasn’t going to cringe.

  “You couldn’t deal with an Osaka bean tractor factory. What makes you think you can cut an alien out of your territory?”

  “Shit, Orris. If I’d known you were in this mood, I’d have brung you an Elastrator and you could snag my balls with the rubber rings.” DeSpain scowled at the businessmen too dumb to know what to order from a Japanese for lunch.

  The chef muttered, “Europeans think Americans work too hard. Europeans must not work at all.”

  DeSpain said to Orris, “You made his day.” He ordered miso soup himself and ate it even if it did seem made from fermented leaves and slightly rotten soybeans. He asked the chef, “Is it hot in Japan?”

  “Not all over,” the chef said.

  When they finished eating, DeSpain said, “Orris, would you want to go with me to see the alien?”

  Orris looked as if she wanted to remind him that on their wedding day he’d promised to handle all the illegalities without bothering her. Then she sighed and said, “Why not? If I’m with you, it’s just a social call, right.”

  “Right.”

  “What about Steve?”

  Dennis said, “Go call your mother and see if she can pick him up at the bus stop.”

  DeSpain waited. Orris came back from the phone booth and nodded. He helped her in the car and asked, “Scenic route or 220?”

  “Let’s just get there okay. I don’t want to be too late coming home or Mother will worry.”

  They took 220 to Rocky Mount and picked up 40. Orris said, “I sometimes wish we lived in Roanoke.”

  “Man once told me Roanoke had the worse vice for a city that size he’d ever seen.”

  Orris laughed. “I’m not being hypocritical,” DeSpain said. “Liquor’s not like drugs. People can afford liquor without stealing.”

  “I said when I married you that I understood what you did. Are you getting too soft, perhaps?”

  Shit on Orris when she had these Elastrator moods. They passed out of the rest of Rocky Mount in silence. Then, as they passed Ferrum College and began the mountain part of the ride, Orris said, “I have a tremendous nostalgia for the present.”

  “What do you mean by that?” DeSpain said, sure that Orris had deliberately made a confusing statement.

  “Whatever happens at the alien’s house will be the future. I love everything in my life up to that moment.”

  “Even me?”

  “I do love you, Dennis. You make my life dramatic, but you’re not so brutal that you make me nervous. Even if that reduces your efficiency.”

  “You think this alien’s going to gobble us up.”

  A semi was laboring up the road, having ignored the warnings back in Woolwine. Orris watched it, Dennis watched it, both wondering if it would collapse on them and make all Orris’s fears of the alien moot. It tottered on the turn but didn’t fall.

  “I saw one once crush a Volkswagen on Route 8,” Orris said. “Mother beat me for coming home late. I had to go back and cut across to 58. We’d gone to the beach music festival and we were going to take the parkway home.”

  “You want to go to the beach music festival? It’s next week.”

  “I really am worried about what we’re going to be doing in the next hour.”

  “And you still remember your mamma whipping you for coming home late, even worry about it at twenty-seven years old. God, Orris, she won’t whip Steve because we’re late.”

  “This alien, I hear that he spies on us. He memorizes what people do.”

  “He knew what I did.”

  “Did you tell me that?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  They shut up again. Dennis looked over at Orris and saw her lips move as if she was worrying them with her teeth, without letting the teeth show. Discreetly scared.

  Another truck passed them, on straight enough road that they didn’t have to worry. Then Dennis saw a glimpse of faceted ears under a baseball cap, the alien driving a deluxe Oldsmobile van. “That’s him,” he said to Orris. “In the cruiser van.” He found a driveway and turned around.

  Orris said, “Maybe the trucks are his, too. It’s a bit unusual to see two tractor-trailer rigs trying to make it up Route 40 in the same hour.”

  “Well, at least he didn’t know we were coming,” Dennis said, noting the license plate on the cruiser: TURK. It reminded him that he had to fly over to Uralsk the first of July.

  The Oldsmobile pulled over. Dennis pulled over behind him. The alien came out of the car and handed Dennis house keys and said, “You can wait for me at my house.” His English was better than it had been when DeSpain was fishing on the Smith.

  Orris took the alien’s house keys from Dennis and said, “Thanks.”

  Dennis wondered if she’d gone nuts. He asked the alien, “You want us to wait for you at your house. Why?”

  “You were looking for me, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Dennis wondered for a second how the alien knew, then remembered that he’d turned around to follow the Oldsmobile.

  “We should talk, you and I,” the alien said. “And you must know where my house is if you were driving this way.”

  “People gossip,” Orris said to the alien as he turned to go back to the Oldsmobile cruiser. The alien shrugged his shoulders before he got back in the car.

  DeSpain started his car again. For an instant he thought about following the alien, now disappearing around a curve. Those were his trucks. He’s really operating at scale. “What do you think?” he said to Orris.

  “It’s your business. Is it better to be friendly at first or hostile?”

  “I don’t know in this case. He’s traveling awful conspicuous.” He turned toward Patrick County. Orris looked at the alien’s house keys. DeSpain glanced over briefly and saw a cylinder key and two computer card keys on the chain.

  Yes, those were his trucks, DeSpain thought as they pulled in the dirt road full of double tire tracks just beyond the Patrick County line that would wind back into Franklin. “I know someone’s in on this,” he said.

  “Do you bribe law enforcement officers?” Orris asked almost as if it had never occurred to her.

  “You’re supposed to be discreet.” DeSpain tried to sort out the tracks—at least two tractor-trailer rigs, the cruiser, and one motorcycle. “This is crazy.”

  “Unless he has alien weapons.” Orris said that as if she’d discarded the thought really, but just wanted to mention it in case.

  The Volvo motor cut dead, the car rolling uphill on its own momentum as though the timing belt broke. But it wasn’t the kind of car that broke its timing belt. DeSpain threw on the brakes to keep from rolling backward and tried the lights—no electrical system. “You know, if he’d been human,” DeSpain said to Orris, “I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to take his goddamn keys.”

  Orris said, “We’ll have to wait for him now.”

  “If he’s got a phone, I’m calling a tow truck. Of course he’d got a phone line out.”

  “Maybe it’s dedicated to computers?”

  “Orris, I’ll get someone to get me a tow truck. I think a motorcycle went in and not out.”

  Orris sighed and opened the car door. “Shouldn’t we push it off the road?”

  “Shit.” DeSpain saw that he could roll
the Volvo backwards downhill. Once he did that, he tried to start it again. It started. Something a few yards away killed electrical systems. He was glad he didn’t have a pacemaker. “We can mail him his keys.”

  Just then they heard the motorcycle in the distance. Its sound shifted, dopplering in on them. They saw the helmeted motorcyclist dressed in unstudded leathers, a skid scuff along one arm. He stopped, went to a tree, then said, “You can bring the car through now.” The voice was broadcast outside the helmet, which was too opaque to see through. The face screen looked newer than the rest of the helmet, which seemed to have been abraded in the same accident that scarred the leather jacket.

  DeSpain followed the motorcyclist back to the house, stopping twice when the man got off and fiddled with various trees. The motorcyclist asked, “Do you have the keys? Turk locked me out.”

  Before DeSpain could decide whether to admit he did, Orris said, “Yes.”

  The motorcyclist took off his helmet. He had short dark hair and a perfect nose with a matching jawline that DeSpain had priced once at a plastic surgeon’s at $25,000. DeSpain wondered what was this clown. He said to the man, “I’m Dennis DeSpain. Turk is the alien, right?” When the man nodded, he kept on, “He sent out a load of liquor.”

  “We’re not sure what to make of this, Mr. DeSpain, but then you’re a liquor distributor, too, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know a man who’s proved it in nine years. We’ve got a hardware store in town, health-food store by the lake, motel, overseas investments.”

  “Mr. DeSpain, neither the Department of Defense nor the State Department cares about Franklin County illegalities except that an alien is here, modeling his behavior after you people, giving keys to his house to local moonshiners.”

  “I’m not a moonshiner,” DeSpain said. He always associated the terms moonshine and moonshiner with people from Greensboro who wanted to play folkloristic. “I wanted to meet the alien.”

  “Why? Don’t explain. I know why.”

  “And why haven’t you federal people done anything?”

  Orris said, “Why don’t we go inside? I’m Orris DeSpain. And what shall we call you?”

  “Henry Allen,” the man said. Orris gave the keys to DeSpain, who found the hole for the round key and the slots for the two cards. Allen said, “Put the two cards in first, then turn the key. Otherwise, you release the Dobermans.”